GovCMS service desk

Help desk

The GovCMS service desk offers two types of assistance:

1. Help desk
2. Advisory support

GovCMS customers experiencing any technical issues should raise a ticket in the service desk. You will need to be a nominated technical contact for your agency in order to access the service desk. If you require access, contact the GovCMS team.

For general enquiries, the service desk hours are 8:30am to 5:30pm AEDT Monday to Friday (excluding public holidays in Victoria only). For any critical infrastructure issues, all customers can access the GovCMS Service 24x7 with a maximum 60-minute initial response time.

As a SaaS subscription customer, your agency can submit an unlimited number of support requests or tickets. As a PaaS subscription customer, the number of tickets you can raise is set by the subscription level purchased. Examples of ticket topics may include any questions relating to Drupal modules, custom code/configuration, and third party services.

The service desk doesn't provide support relating to professional services such as investigation or discovery, design and development or maintenance of websites. If your agency is interested in working with Salsa Digital to build, enhance, or maintain your site, you will need to go through the appropriate procurement channels.

Advisory support

All GovCMS customers can get advice from Salsa Digital on best practice for generic topics including security, migration, performance tuning, module development and Drupal site architecture.

Advisory support may include phone or teleconference conversations followed by an email or access to existing documentation. Site-specific research, implementation/installation activities, and/or creation of any new deliverable(s) are out of scope for advisory support.

To access advisory support contact the GovCMS team.

Raising a support request

We’re here to help. To raise an issue you will need to complete a job ticket online through the GovCMS service desk. In your ticket we’ll need a description of your issue and the level of impact to your business. Once submitted, your ticket will be sent to Salsa Digital through their IT help desk program called Fresh Desk.

The support team at Salsa Digital will receive your job ticket, evaluate your request and respond. Their response time will depend on whether the impact to your business is critical, high, medium or low. The support team may also ask you to provide additional information about your reported issue (for example, website functionality, related applications needed to diagnose the issue and infrastructure related information).

To help you and the support team keep track of your issue, the support team will record progress notes and related communication in the online ticket system, Fresh Desk, right through to finding a resolution.

If you are having issues raising a ticket online, you can call the Salsa hotline and they will raise a ticket on your behalf.

Issue types and response times

Critical or high - what's the difference?

Is your agency’s production system inoperative? Is your business operation and productivity severely impacted with no available workaround? Has there been a major breach to privacy or security? If you answered yes, your issue may be critical.

If your agency’s production system is operating but the issue is disrupting your business operations and there is a short term workaround, your issue is high not critical.

Critical tickets raised outside business hours will get people out of bed. If your issue doesn't warrant this kind of response, raise it as a high priority issue in the first instance. You can always escalate the issue later if your business impact changes. If you are still unsure of whether your issue is critical or high, refer to the definitions below.

The time it will take for the support team to respond to your job ticket will depend on the business impact outlined in the below table. The ‘Acknowledgment time’ is the maximum time it should take for you to receive an initial response. The ‘Reaction time’ is the maximum time it should take for the support team to analyse your issue and develop a plan to fix it).

Critical

• Agency's production system is inoperative or agency’s business operation or productivity is severely impacted with no available workaround or is a critical security issue.
• Critical issues are eligible for 24x7 support.
• Additionally, Salsa Digital treats site launch related issues as critical and eligible for 24x7 support if the following conditions apply:
• Launch is less than three calendar days away.
• Launch date has been registered and confirmed with either Salsa Digital at least seven days prior to expected launch.
• Acknowledgement time:
  • 60 minutes 24x7
• Reaction time:
  • Best effort (immediate) reaction time 24x7

High

• Agency’s production system is operating but issue is disrupting agency’s business operations; workaround not suitable for sustained operations.
• This is the highest designation available for development and help desk questions.
• Acknowledgement time:
  • During business hours: 4 hours
  • Outside business hours: 4 hours commencing from the next business day
• Reaction time:
  • During business hours: 8 hours
  • Outside business hours: 8 hours commencing from the next business day

Medium

• Agency's system is operating and the issue’s impact on the agency's business operations is moderate to low; a workaround or alternative is available.
• Acknowledgement time:
  • During business hours: 4 hours
  • Outside business hours: 4 hours commencing from the next business day

• Reaction time:
  • 2 Business Days

Low

• Issue is a minor inconvenience and does not impact business operations in any significant way; issues with little or no time sensitivity.
• Acknowledgement time:
  • During business hours: 4 hours
  • Outside business hours: 4 hours commencing from the next business day

• Reaction time:
  • 2 Business Days

Service Level Agreement

Salsa Digital and the Department of Finance have Service Level Agreements (SLA) in place regarding Service Desk tickets. These relate to Salsa Digital’s acknowledgement and reaction to tickets based on their issue type.

Salsa Digital will acknowledge a:

• critical impact platform issue within 1 hour
• Non-critical issue within 4 business hours

Salsa Digital will analyse, plan a fix and communicate a plan to a:

• critical application issue as soon as possible (immediately, or best effort)
• high application and infrastructure issue within 8 business hours
• medium/low application & infrastructure issue within 2 business days

There are no resolution SLAs or service levels in place given the variety of requests and potential issues.

Reporting a critical issue

To report an issue that meets the criteria for a critical request you will need to complete a job ticket online through the GovCMS service desk. Tickets with a critical business impact will alert support staff to respond to your issue as a priority. Outside business hours users will be directed to log a critical ticket online.

The support team notify the Salsa Digital Service Desk Manager and the GovCMS Service Manager in all cases submitted as ‘critical’. This helps ensure that these situations receive management attention immediately.

Managing a critical issue during business hours

When you submit a critical job ticket, you will receive an acknowledgement email from the support staff at Digital Salsa through Fresh Desk. They will also notify the GovCMS team at the Department of Finance that critical issue has been raised.

The support team will keep you notified of their progress until your issues is resolved.

Managing a critical issue outside business hours

When you submit a critical job ticket, the on call support team at Digital Salsa will respond to your issue in the Fresh Desk ticketing system.

Depending on the severity of the issue and the number of sites affected by the issue, the Salsa Digital support team will notify the Department of Finance on call service operations contact.

The support team will keep you notified of their progress until your issue is resolved.

Escalating an issue

We understand priorities can change

An issue that was low yesterday may become high today. If business impact of the issue has increased you escalate the issue by updating the ticket details on the service desk and the support team will respond accordingly.

We understand that sometimes you may encounter critical problems that require a higher level of communication and interaction and sometimes the priority of an issue can change.

The GovCMS Support Team are here to help, we will work with you to develop a work around for any issue raised as soon as practical and will work continuously on all critical issues until they're resolved.

Unsatisfied with the progress?

If you're unsatisfied with the current plan of action for an active issue you can request to review the matter with the Service Desk Manager by updating your service ticket.

The Salsa Digital Service Desk Manager will review your issue and business needs and formulate an action plan to resolve your issue as quickly as possible.

The support team will inform you of your action plan including deliverables and timelines.

If you are still unsatisfied with the response, you may request to escalate your issue further. In this instance, the Service Desk Manager will notify the Salsa Digital Programme Manager who will discuss the issue with the GovCMS Service Manager (Department of Finance). If the issue needs to be escalated further, the GovCMS team at Finance will brief relevant SES officers from Finance and the customer agency.

Reporting a security incident

What could a security incident look like?

Security incidents can take many forms, for example:

• a data spill (sensitive or classified information inadvertently published)
• if you think someone has used your account
• unauthorised access to, or defacement of a website or
• other suspicious activity.

If you detect or suspect an incident, threat or weakness relating to your website/s hosted on GovCMS, report it via the service desk as soon as possible.

The support team will investigate the issue and work with you to understand the cause and to agree what response is needed.

Depending on the nature of the incident, you may be required to report it to your agency security team, the Cyber Security Centre and in the case of breaches of privacy to any affected users of your website.